


Cry in the Night

by orphan_account



Category: Walker (TV 2020)
Genre: Abortion, F/M, Ghosts, Medical Malpractice, US Politics - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:08:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28910604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Cordell Walker was a trained Texas Ranger. He thought he was prepared for everything.Everything did not include the return of his wife as a ghost, his gay brother's political leanings, and everything that came after.
Relationships: Cordell Walker/Emily Walker
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Cry in the Night

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't watch the episode. I know nothing about the show and I do not want to know anything about the show. Also, please do not take this seriously.
> 
> Warnings: implied ghost sex, abortion, American politics, general medical malpractice

Cordell sighed as he got up from the bed. He couldn't bear to look back at the space where Emily used to sleep, was still sleeping. He was sure that she was gone. That night she disappeared, he had searched for her until he ran out of gas. After that, he had gone on foot until he collapsed on the side of the road. If he hadn't been found by a trucker on his way to Dallas, Cordell would have laid out there for days before anyone found him. 

He knew. He knew in his hear that she was gone, but she was still there. She was in his bed and last night she was in his arms, whispering his name like she had never left.

Two years. If he had been a stronger or more reasonable man, he would have called his doctor. New prescription. New dosage. He would have asked Dr. Monroe to check him over again. Instead, he was trying to ignore the subtle transparency around Emily, how she didn't have her old sharp edges anymore.

"Honey?"

"Yes?" he replied. She sounded just like Emily. He wasn't sure how well he remembered her voice, but it sounded like the voice in his head that told him when he was following what he was taught and not what he believed in. 

"Check your phone."

He didn't turn. If he did, he might see a nightmare or worse. He might see his regrets, his failures, his mistakes. 

Cordell picked up his phone from the bedside table. The screen lit up and showed him a screen full of texts. Everyone he knew was texting or calling in variations of "are you seeing this?" and "where are you?". There were photos. The messages didn't appear to end. His phone buzzed incessantly with calls and he dismissed them, trying to read the message from his mother.

Shit.

He got up, grabbing the shirt from the floor and not looking back. He left his kids with Liam. They were supposed to be at his brother's house, but if they were there, they were alone. 

Liam. Liam was in Washington. He was in Washington and waving a Trump pride flag as he stormed the Capitol building.   
  


* * *

The doctor arrived quickly. Dr. Monroe was a psychologist and a weird one at that. His hair always stood up every which way and he refused to dress professionally. At the moment, he was wearing a red tee, dark wash jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked like he had been tossed around in a bar and then dragged through a bush backwards. Authentic. Grounded. Real. That's actually what attracted Cordell to this doctor in the first place. The other psychologists had been very professional, very polite, but Dr. Monroe had patiently listened to him for thirty minutes before being very firm with him. It was like a ship in a storm seeing a lighthouse and the lighthouse was pointing him home.

"I heard about your brother," the doctor said. His brows furrowed in concern and Cordell felt the tension in his chest tighten.

"Right. this isn't about that," Cordell whispered. The kids didn't know about their uncles yet and Cordell didn't want them to know, not until he sorted everything out.

The doctor stopped in the doorway clearly confused. "Then, what is..."

"Dad, who is that?"

His son was holding two cups of pop. Right. He had set them up with pizza and the CW. He was pretty sure one of those was a mistake, but he wasn't sure which one and his daughter had insisted. 

"This is my friend, Victor," Cordell said with a smile. He knew it didn't reach his eyes, but he didn't really have time to deal with that right now. Hopefully, this was enough. It had to be.

"We're just going to have a chat upstairs." Dr. Monroe gave them a genuine smile and Cordell felt a spike of envy. He couldn't smile at them like that. 

Yet, a small voice that sounded like Dr. Monroe said. You can, if you keep working towards this.

Right. Keep working towards this. He had kept the kids downstairs because he didn't know what to say, what to tell them if they saw him interacting with their mother. They resented him for leaving them, but he could deal with that. He could deal with the glares that hid confused eyes when they thought he wasn't looking. He could handle their anger and their frustration as he tried to get back into their lives even though he didn't deserve it, didn't deserve them and their willingness to let him keep trying. 

If they got through this, he would try so much harder. He loved them and he had let his pain eclipse the truth. He had been so selfish, so wrapped up in his own suffering that he forgot they were suffering too.

The answer seemed to satisfy the kid and Cordell lead the good doctor upstairs. He hadn't told him what was happening over the phone for fear of sounding absolutely insane. 

"Dr. Monroe," a soft voice called.

The doctor stopped dead in his tracks. 

"Is that?"

Cordell turned. Emily stood in the doorway, her stomach was definitely visibly showing now. The soft curve of the bump looked so familiar, but he couldn't. He couldn't bear to think of it, not when he hair was stringy with sweat and her whole face was contorted into an expression he hadn't seen before. 

He met the doctor's eyes and nodded. "That's Emily."

The doctor took a step back. He looked spooked, like he had seen a ghost. "You should have your place checked for a gas leak."

Cordell opened his mouth to say that the house was perfectly safe when a bitten off groan interrupted them.

Emily slumped against the door frame. Blood puddled at her feet and her face went paler, something Cordell didn't know was possible given her ghostly state.

"Doctor, please," she moaned.

Cordell tried to breathe as she slumped over, but he couldn't find the power to run to her side. His feet were glued to the ground where he stood. He wasn't sure when the doctor moved, but Dr. Monroe appeared at her side, gently helping her up.

"Right," Dr. Monroe said to the ghost. His tone was as soft as a petal and smooth as cream. "Go lie on the bed. I'll be there in a moment."

She followed his instructions and Dr. Monroe returned to his side.

"What do you think?" Cordell asked.

The doctor looked askance. His big, brown eyes questioning as he squared his shoulders. "Cordell, I am sharing a hallucination with you right now. What the fuck is happening?"

Cordell took a deep breath. He could do this. He could say this without the anger and stress overwhelming him. He exhaled deeply and found his center. He could do this.

"Emily's pregnant with a half-human, half-ghost baby and if we don't abort, she will die."

He paused, waiting for the good doctor's reaction.

The man was silent. Then he pulled out a flask and took a swig from it. 

"That doesn't look like like good coping mechanisms," Cordell remarked.

In fact, it looked exactly like the coping mechanism that Dr. Monroe had worked so hard to iron out of Cordell. They had spent whole sessions working on finding better, healthier ways to cope with his problems. None of them involved finding the table-end of the bottle through the opening. 

"Do as I say and not as I do," Dr. Monroe sighed. "Ghost abortion. I didn't bring any medical equipment with me because I thought you were having a breakdown."

"What are we going to do?"

Dr. Monroe peered at him, brows furrowed and brown eyes narrowed. The look seemed to go on forever before he looked away and sighed. The tension in Cordell's chest untangled for a split second before it ratcheted up again with the sound of Emily's whimpers. The doctor rubbed his face before looking him in the eye again. This time, he gave him a firm, hardened look.

"Get me a wire coat hanger and the vodka. It's been a long time since medical school, but she's already dead so I don't think I could cause more damage."

Cordell nodded before blindly stumbling off. Coat hanger. He was pretty sure there were some in the closet by the front door. He had replaced all the others with plastic ones when he got back, but he hadn't tossed out the old ones yet. Over the beating of his heart and the blood rushing in his ears as he went down the steps, he could vaguely hear the soft sounds of Dr. Monroe speaking to Emily.

The kids were fine. They were watching that show they liked, the one with the boy with the bright red hair. He remembered what Emily had said when she was alive, that it was the worst box-dye job she had ever seen. He had laughed with her then and kissed her cheek thinking about how her job at the salon was going so well and how she wanted to open her own in a few years, when their son was older. The world was at their feet then. She had been so excited for their next adventure. He had been so excited for her, for them.

Dejectedly, he grabbed the coat hangers and padded back upstairs.

When he returned, Emily had an old t-shirt twisted into a knot between her teeth. She gave him a bitter look, one sad and pained as she breathed through the pain. With the amount of blood she lost already, she would have been dead a second time.

A song was playing on through the tinny speakers on the phone on the bedside table.

"What is this?"

"This is The Cab," Dr. Monroe replied as he took a coat hanger. With a deft twist of the hand, he shaped it and started pouring the vodka that Cordell absolutely did not keep in the closet over it. 

"No. Why are you putting on music?" It wasn't loud enough that the kids would notice, but if his daughter went upstairs, she would definitely hear it.

"Because I'm about to perform an abortion without anesthetic or any of the equipment I would normally need." Dr. Monroe sighed deeply before gesturing for Cordell to help him hold Emily down. "How are the kids doing?"

Cordell blinked. They were... he had looked over them for a second. They were wrapped in blankets and fully absorbed with the show. 

"They're doing fine. They're watching Riverdale."

Dr. Monroe chuckled, the sound a little strained and halfway between laughter and hysteria.

"Good show. The Jarchie is so endgame."

Cordell and Emily shared a significant look while Monroe continued his preparations. 

"You're not the only one short a marble. I'm desperately trying to get through this so I can process this later," the doctor muttered as he finished his preparations.

The doctor turned to Emily, his expression contrite. "This is going to hurt."

If asked about it later and that was a big if, Cordell would have said he breathed through the pain. His hands were crushed as Emily squeezed. Her bitten off groans cut him to his core and he wondered what he had done to drag her down with him.

After fifteen minutes, the doctor leaned back and Emily let out a sigh of relief.

"Cordell?" she asked, only a little louder than a whisper.

"Yes, love?"

"I'll be back soon." Her tear stained cheeks lost their translucent luster and she fell into a dead faint, chest still heaving. Then she faded away.

The blood on the sheets was gone. All that was left was a twisted coat hanger and a doctor who looked three seconds from passing out himself. His face was pale and the dark circles that Cordell hadn't noticed before were prominent.

This might have been a mistake. The man looked broken.

Cordell stumbled over an placed one hand on the man's shoulder.

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Call me, Carl," Dr. Monroe muttered under his breath. "I'm no longer your therapist."

Cordell was stunned for a second before he responded. "Fair."

The doctor hummed and knocked back a shot of vodka. God knows where he'd found the vodka glass. 

Cordell couldn't help but feel something bitter twist inside. He'd failed to protect something. In asking for help, he had broken something important and he wasn't sure what he could do or if there was anything he could say to fix it. He couldn't fix it really. He and his doctor had a shared hallucination where they had performed an abortion on the pregnant ghost of his wife to save her life to the angsty alternative rock beat of "Angel with a Shotgun" by The Cab.

Cordell felt his phone buzz in his pocket and didn't fail to notice how the sound made the doctor jump.

"What is it?" he asked as Cordell fished it out of his pocket and unlocked it.

What the actual fuck? Cordell read the message twice, no three times, before turning the phone to the doctor. "My father is holding up a bank."

The man read the words on the screen, emotions flickering across his face fasters than Cordell could read them. Confusion. Disgust. Pain. Regret. "With a vintage colt he stole from a security box? You know what? I'm sorry I asked. Go take care of it. I'll watch the kids."

"You're drunk," Cordell protested. The doctor was in the middle of knocking back another shot as he spoke.

The doctor, Carl, shook his head and shoved Cordell. He wasn't strong enough to move the larger man, but the force caught Cordell of guard. "If you think a little bit of whiskey and two shots of vodka will get me drunk, you're dumber than I thought. Go take care of it."

The tone hit him harder than the punch. There was a degree of bitterness there that hadn't been there before. Dr. Monroe had always projected careful, non-judgmental concern before; now, Cordell felt the full weight of the other man's judgment and derision.

His head was swimming.

They headed downstairs together and Cordell wished his children well before putting on his hat and heading out. He heard the kids talking to Dr. Monroe... Carl about the show, catching the man up on what had happened before the commercial break. 


End file.
